We apologize for the fuzziness in some of the audio. There’s an issue in our lines that we’re having trouble isolating.

Rather than discuss the doctrinal stuff involved in the church (known as ecclesiology), I thought I would share some links to a series I wrote last fall as we prepared for merging Heritage Baptist Church and Grace Baptist Church.

Because we will be journeying together toward this merger, we will be posting some thoughts about the merger. Any time two congregations take a faith risk like this, there are a lot of concerns and we want to try to make sure we address these concerns.

The intensely individualistic local church idea has to be rethought and possibly even rejected in order for it to happen. This product of modernism has bred distrust and disunity in the Church, and it is the biggest obstacle that has to be overcome.

People are not our consumers; they are our fellow human beings. Salvation is not a commodity; it is a necessary gift, a divine blessing. Ministry is not our strategy to ‘get’ more people and preaching is not about ‘appealing’ to people

Redundancy is absolutely essential to survival as a church. When you only have one group of people who can accomplish a task, if something happens to those people, you are in a ‘dead stick’ situation. You’re going in and there is nothing you can do about it.

We do expect God to do something awesome and we hope that this is what will happen. But we cannot expect this merger to fix all of our problems or answer all of our questions. Those expectations are too high and no matter how successful the merged congregation is, you are bound to disappointed.

For a church to grow together, they have to strike the balance between sitting together and working together. There are times for all of us to sit and learn, and other times when the seats should be emptied. There are times when we have to give our chairs to someone else; and other times when we need to take up a couple of chairs to rest.